The decoration test
Move the scene into this year, change the clothes, and read it again. If the argument, the kiss, the chase and the refusal all still work, the century was costume. Readers of historical fiction can feel that, even when they cannot name it. They came for a world that pushes back.
The test is not “would this feeling exist then?” Love, envy, fear and ambition are old. The test is “would this obstacle exist then, in this form, at this price?” A woman who wants to leave a marriage does not face the same door in 1820 as in 2020. If you give her the modern door, you have written a contemporary novel in a bonnet.
Make the want expensive
Expense is the point. A voyage costs a season and a reputation. A true name costs a parish. A quiet life costs a lie told every Sunday. A vote, where a vote exists, costs whoever is watching the hustings. The novel begins when the want is clear and the price is particular to the year.
Vague opposition — “society”, “the times”, “men” — does not collide with anything. Name the mechanism. A father’s settlement. A guild that will not enrol her. A tide that will not wait. A law that makes the child illegitimate if she tells the truth. Mechanisms can be stood in a room and argued with. Abstractions cannot.
One want, one constraint, one turn
A scene can be modest and still be a scene. Somebody wants something now. The year makes it costly or impossible in a specific way. By the end, the want has been refused, delayed, granted at a price, or replaced by a worse one. If none of those happen, you have written a passage, not a scene, and passages are where readers look up.
Historical novels accumulate length because passages feel like work. They contain facts. Work is not the same as motion. Cut or compress any stretch in which the constraint never touches the want. The research can survive in a sentence. The scene cannot survive without a change.
Period minds, not modern debates in costume
The want should be thinkable by the person who has it. A 1640 mind can resist, scheme, despair and love against the grain. It will not usually do so in the vocabulary of a later century. Give the resistance period tools: scripture, custom, a kinsman’s debt, a loophole, a bribe, a well-timed illness.
When you need the reader to disapprove of the era, you do not need the heroine to deliver the disapproval as a speech. Show the price. A reader who watches a constraint land on a body will feel the argument more cleanly than a reader who is told the argument in language the body would not have had.
Try this
For the scene you are about to write, finish this sentence before you draft: she wants ___; this year makes it cost ___. If the cost would be the same in a novel set now, replace it.